DAO vulnerability...

DAO vulnerability

2016-07-14Alpereum supports the Hardfork

The Alpereum pool is taking steps to support and implement the proposed hardfork solution to the DAO vulnerability, which was discovered in June.

There is no perfect solution to the problems this vulnerability caused. Considerations must be balanced between health of the eco system, the victims, and Ethers reputability in public perception – but also to restore trust in network in terms of future smart contracts.

All considering – the majority of the network is in favor of intervening on behalf of the DAO token holders in this specific instance, and this seems to be the prevailing sentiment between core foundation members as well even as neutral as they may be.

We thus support the Hardfork, as the “least bad” alternative, but we caution all who put their faith in future smart contracts: The mining community may be in agreement to intervene this time around, but we are equally in agreement that this will have to be an exception!

Alpereum will implement and run the community developed hardfork, as soon as it is ready and has passed review.

Due to the recommendation of the Ethereum Foundation to run geth 1.4.8 without the —dao-soft-fork command line option, we have done so and will continue doing so, until a solution proposal has been released, addresses the security issues discovered.

We feel that it is for the benefit of the eco system, and also the value of Ether as a crypto asset, that the community assists the DTHs (DAO Token Holders) in recovering their assets.
While it is unfortunate that a fork is needed for this, that the unassailability of the ETH blockchain and smart contracts put on it is thus interfered with, and while people should do more due-diligence before placing millions into ustested smart contracts, we beleive an exception in this instance is in place.

Code is not law – at least not yet (ask any lawyer), and Ethereum is still in its infancy as a software platform. Since the stakes are so high, the damage to so many so significant, and because the wider financial world will not understand arguments such as “code is law” and nor will mainstream investors into ETH, we beleive that a MtGox style event should be avoided in ETH at this stage. It would take at least a year if not more for ETH to recover from that.

So – in this instance the DTHs should be helped, but we caution anyone to think that this will be a repeat event. As miners we chose to help this time around, at cost and effort to ourselves – but the next poorly written smart contract victims may not find us so understanding. We hope the lesson was learned for everyone, and that we may move on from this point, wiser and when it comes to smart contracts, much more carefully.

/Alpereum

2016-06-20
The current stance of Alpereum is that we support the ETH Foundation and the proposed software fork: https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/06/17/critical-update-re-dao-vulnerability/
We are watching the situation closely, reviewing all the various arguments and proposals, in order to follow the path which we judge to be in the best interest of the ETH network and community as a whole.

Our commitment is to the network and the eco-system, and we view this from a practical (not puritan) angle, which makes us sympathetic towards the DTH’s more so than towards those who performed the recursive DAO splits.

In its present form, the ultimate say in the question of forks on the ETH network is to be had by the miners. Few are more deeply invested in the health of the whole eco-system than us. Rest assured that we will take this responsibility seriously.

It is still too early to say how this situation is best resolved, but if Alpereum can help prevent damage to both the network, the credibility of ETH in public perception and unfortunate DTH’s, we will.